HTML <source> Tag - Audio or Video Source

 

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

❰source❱ for source of audio or video. ❰source❱ description, syntax, usage, attributes and examples. HTML-5.com is a great guide for web developers. TV Series & Actors and Actresses. Follow TV Series and HTML 5 on Google+.

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The <source> Tag in HTML 5

The source tag identifies one possible source of the embedded audio or video media indicated by its parent tag. The parent tags under which <source> tags can be coded are:

More than one source tag can be included within an <audio> tag or <video> tag to allow different browsers to choose among multiple source formats. The attributes of the source tag supply the location of the content to be included and additional information needed to decode the content.

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<source/> Tag Syntax

Rules for coding HTML source/ elements
<source .../>

<source/> Content Model

Contents of the source element

Content: Empty. All properties are coded using attributes.

Since the <source/> tag is a void element, it is not allowed to have any content, even HTML comments and therefore should always be coded as a self-closing standalone tag, ending with the delimiter string /> rather than just > (<source .../>).

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<source/> Tag Attributes

Attributes of the <source/> tag
global attributes In addition to the personal attributes of the <source> tag below, any of the common HTML attributes can also be coded.
codecs The codecs attribute indicates which codecs should be used for decoding the content referenced by the src attribute.
src

a URI reference that resolves to the URL of the media resource

Use percent escape codes as explained in the URL-encoding tutorial for any special characters in the URI.

If the value of the src attribute is an HTTP URL, it may contain any of the following components:

  1. protocol scheme, typically http: or else https:
  2. username, followed by an "@"
  3. host name or IP address
  4. port number, which defaults to 80 for the http scheme and 443 for the https scheme
  5. absolute or relative path
  6. search query, indicated by "?"

If the protocol scheme, username, host name/IP address and port number are omitted the default is the current host - the same server as the one handling the current document. If the path starts with a slash /..., it is an absolute path from the document root directory (AKA "web root") on the server. A relative path will be resolved relative to the base of the current document.

type The type attribute is the MIME media type of the video content.

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<source/> Tag Examples

Examples of the source element in HTML 5

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Changes in HTML 5 - <source> Tag

What's new in HTML 5
Differences between HTML 5 and earlier versions of HTML

The <source> tag did not exist in older versions of HTML.

The 2000-2010 Recommendations from the W3C HTML Working Group defined the HTML namespace for the names of all HTML element types, which now includes the source element name. In older (pre-2000) versions of HTML, element type names were not associated with a namespace.

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